Fly Me to the Cleaners

The Friday-afternoon flight from San Diego to Vegas is called "the Stripper Flight." High-priced kewpie dolls with basketballs forced under their too-tight tank tops wing from their beach condos to Sin City and then return on the Sunday redeye or first flight Monday morning. The rounded, bubbly, giggling, bleached, and teased darlings with shiny fingernails and peeking tattoos stand up in the aisles and turn around in their seats. They talk to their girlfriends across the way and flirt with potential customers, "You should come out."

Strippers are masters at selling. Strippers understand that any interaction between opposite genders has an undercurrent of sex. Entering a stripper's sphere and making conversation eventually develops into an invitation to what the men see as sex and what the stripper sees as business. "You should come out," a brunette says to a trio of sailors three rows ahead of me. She stands in the aisle, resting her suffocating indigo jeans against the arm of her seat and leans back. She swishes her straight auburn hair over one shoulder, and the dopey kids she's talking to say, "Yeah. Yeah. We ought to. What club is it?"

Palomino Club. Olympic Garden. Leopard Lounge.

All around the plane, girls are flirting and ordering drinks from the attendants. They pull long strings of bubblegum from their mouths and feed it back into their upturned faces and blow bubbles and snap the pink candy in their teeth. They're in velour track suits unzipped to their navels, and the pink lenses of their sunglasses are embedded with tiny fake diamonds that glint in the sunlight like the shimmery gloss on their lips.

My sinuses fill with the musk and alcohol of 20 different perfumes. I turn to my right and look past the canyons of cleavage to the mountain range outside the window. The chunky rectangle of yellow light sits at the end of our row, and the brightness streams in and shines across the porcelain skin of the girls and highlights the seatbacks in front of us.

"Going to Vegas?" I ask the girls.

"Yeah," they say and smile and touch each other's hands.

"What club do you work in?"

"I work in Club Paradise. She works in Spearmint Rhino," the bubblehead in the middle seat, closest to me, says.

"We're roommates," they say.

"Of course you are."

"How'd you know we were strippers?" the one next to the window asks.

"Just lucky, I guess." I push my cheeks out with a broad smile and they return it. "My name's Ollie," I offer, and hold out my hand. We shake hands. Their names are Jessica and Rebecca.

"Are you girls still in school, or do you work for a living?"

"She used to go to SDSU," Jessica says, pointing a thumb at the blonde in the window.

"But why should I, you know?" Rebecca jumps in. "I'm making more money now than if I graduated and got my dream job, y'know?"

"I do know. Do you work in San Diego or only in Vegas?"

"Vegas," they say in harmony. "The clubs out here pay more," Jessica adds.

"Do you have apartments in both cities?"

"No," Rebecca, the closest one, answers. "We stay with one of the girls who lives out here. She lets us crash in her place. She has a phat condo; it'd be worth, like, half a million dollars in San Diego."

The dusty length of road that is "the Strip" and the needle of the Stratosphere tower streak past the window to our left. In that adjacent row is a young woman and a thin man with wavy gray hair. She looks like his daughter, but their body language says they're a couple. His linen shirt, cufflinks, and hints of gold jewelry answer the question, "How did that old guy get that hot young stripper?"

"Can you get a picture of us?" the dapper gentleman asks of a homely, middle-aged woman on the other side of his girlfriend. The pretty girl leans close and puts her cheek against his, and the woman in the aisle seat holds up a brushed metal cube and puts their image in the center of a tiny screen.

I turn back to my row and look past Jessica and Rebecca. On the ground I see planes lined up diagonally next to the terminal. Their noses are pointed in, like tiny metal animals feeding. Our plane overshoots the airport, putting behind us the little jets on the ground. In a few seconds, we're over the tan and olive drab hills outside the eastern side of the city.

"There goes Vegas," I say and point out the window. Rebecca and Jessica share a concerned glance and then search the surrounding area of seatbacks and stewardess buttons and magazines for a clue that they're on the right flight. I put them at ease with a quick, "We'll come back around. We have to line up on the runway."

"I'm meeting my friend Steve out here," I answer. "We come out twice a year to play craps and bet on sports -- the stuff you can't do at the Indian casinos back home." Steve is the man who coined the term "stripper flight." He's an avid gambler, and before he moved out to Austin, Texas, he'd make the Friday afternoon trip to Vegas about once a month. He came out so often, he got to know some of the girls with whom he'd shared so many trips.

Back across the aisle, the May-December couple shows off their pictures on the digital camera. The middle-aged woman sitting with them leans in to see better and then lets out an "Oh! Oh!" and turns her face toward me. Her cheeks fill up bright and blush. She's embarrassed by what she saw, but she's also smiling.